“I think Democrats need to understand that a political party is about one thing: winning elections,” said Ryan Busse, as he sipped his coffee at a Starbucks in Kalispell, Montana, his home for the last 25 years. Busse is the only Democrat running for Governor of Montana this year.
“It’s not about being right,” he continued. “It’s not about proving to people your 14-point policy plan is genius. It’s not about any of that shit. It’s about winning elections.”
Busse is blunt, with piercing eyes, a neatly trimmed beard, and the intensity one would expect of a successful salesman. In a blue fleece vest and weathered baseball cap, he looks more like an outdoorsy dad than a professional politician. His biography is equally unorthodox––for a Democrat, at least.
2024 marks Busse’s first campaign for public office. Until 2020, he was the head of sales at Kimber, a pillar of the gun-manufacturing establishment.
“I don’t know how many guns I’ve sold exactly, but it’s a lot. Between 2 and 3 million,” Busse said.
Democrats in the traditional mold are struggling in Montana. Is a self-styled, straight-talking former gun salesman the answer to Montana Democrats’ struggles? Is it even possible for a Montana Democrat not named Jon Tester to win in the near future?
Though these questions are Montana-specific, they have broader implications. Democrats are struggling to win votes amongst those without college degrees and those who live in rural or small metropolitan areas. If Democrats want to win the Senate and the presidency, they must be competitive outside major urban centers, and Busse’s unorthodox candidacy may offer lessons for Democrats who are seeking to compete in challenging terrain for the party.
When Busse started at Kimber in the mid-1990s, the company was a small player in the firearms industry. As the firm grew, Busse became well-known among gun-manufacturers as a capable salesman unafraid of entering gun-right battles. He gained prominence in the industry in part by organizing a successful boycott of Smith and Wesson, after the storied gun manufacturer entered into an agreement with the Clinton administration to institute safety measures on their guns.
Busse became more politically active in the early 2000s, beginning to engage with the conservation movement and reflect on the gun lobby’s role in American politics. After leaving Kimber in 2020, Busse published a memoir chronicling his career in––and gradual alienation from––the gun industry. In the book, Gunfight, he criticized what he viewed as the NRA’s corrosive effect on American political discourse. Busse then joined the gun-safety group Giffords as a senior advisor.
This is an unusual biography for a Montana Democrat. The long career in the gun industry; the very public breakup with that industry; the time dedicated to a famous gun-control advocacy group. Ryan Busse is different, and he knows it.
“There’s a very loud subsection of radicalized Republicans who are experts at controlling the mic,” Busse said. “I think that’s 15% of the electorate. The remaining 85% are tired of that shit,” he continued. “They need a Democrat that is not in the national mold, in the coastal democratic movement. They’d like a libertarian Democrat, a kind of a free-thinking, straight-talking Democrat–––all things that I think I am.”
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Montana has long been a breeding ground for powerful, larger-than-life Democratic politicians. From Senator Mike Mansfield, the longest-serving Senate Majority leader in American history, and Senator Max Baucus, the longtime chair of the Senate’s Finance Committee, to Governor Brian Schweitzer, a beloved politician famous for vetoing bills with a branding iron, Montana has produced more than its share of national political talent.
While in America’s popular imagination, the Montana of old is one of cowboys and wide open spaces, the state—–and its Democratic Party—–was built in union halls, on small family farms, in logging camps, and miles underground in Butte’s copper mines.
At the turn of the 20th century, Montana was controlled by copper barons. Butte––a city in Southwestern Montana––sits atop one of the world’s largest copper mines. It was once the largest population center between Minneapolis and Spokane, attracting immigrants from across the world. Mine bosses bought off politicians, and organized labor fought bloody battles with strike-breakers and vigilantes.
The labor movement and the New Deal, which saved many small farms from ruin in the 1930s, forged the modern Montana Democratic Party. The party came to rely on a coalition of union-members, family farmers, and Indigenous Americans.
The decline of Montana’s extractive industries weakened this coalition. In the early 1980s, the mining industry in and around Butte shrunk drastically. The smelter in Great Falls closed in 1982, and by the end of the 1990s timber production had fallen by 80% across the state. The groups that built the Democratic Party of Montana had fallen on hard times.
Even as the labor strongholds that powered generations of Montana Democrats struggled with economic decline, the Montana Democratic Party hung on—–supported by a motley coalition of liberals in college towns, what remained of the labor movement, and Indigenous voters. It was this modified coalition that powered Brian Schweitzer and Steve Bullock to the governor’s mansion in Helena between 2004 and 2020, and continued to elect Max Baucus and Jon Tester to the U.S. Senate.
The Trump era blew a hole in this already-fragile coalition. Democrats lost ground with working-class voters across the nation, and Montana was no exception. In 2014, the state had two Democratic senators and a popular Democratic governor. Democrats held five of Montana’s six statewide elected offices. Today, a decade later, the only statewide elected Democrat is Senator Jon Tester, who is facing a difficult race of his own this year.
In 2020, Montana Democrats nominated term-limited Governor Steve Bullock to run for United States Senate. Bullock lost by more than ten points. Democrats picked Bullock’s Lieutenant Governor, Mike Cooney, to be their candidate for governor. Cooney, a long-time political player who had served in the state legislature and as Montana’s Secretary of State for over a decade, lost as well. After the 2020 elections, Republicans controlled the governor’s mansion and held a supermajority in both legislative chambers for the first time since the 1970s.
“There used to be this iron law of politics that higher turnout was good for Democrats and bad for Republicans,” said Dr. Robert Saldin, director of the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana and a prominent political analyst for Montana Public Radio. “It’s pretty clear to me now that that is not true. A lot of people turned out to vote who have not been regular voters in the past, and those people swung heavily in the Republican direction,” Saldin said.
Two years later, in 2022, Democrats failed to make up any ground in the legislature. Republicans even picked up state senate seats in traditional working-class Democratic strongholds, like Anaconda and Great Falls.
“Montana, used to be, legitimately, a purple state. But that’s just not the case anymore,” Saldin said.
Dr. Jessi Bennion, a political scientist at Montana State University in Bozeman, agreed. “The past decade, and certainly after 2016 and 2020, really sealed the deal that Montana is no longer a purple state. It’s squarely a red state,” she said.
The COVID-19 pandemic further reshaped Montana’s politics. The events of 2020 spurred a population boom across the mountain west, but the growth was particularly stark in Montana. From 2019 to 2022, the state added 50,000 new residents, a roughly 5% increase over a four-year period. While Montana does not publish partisan voter registration data, some observers speculate that those moving to the state skew conservative, attracted by notions of escaping government overreach.
“You do get a lot of these kinds of refugees from California and Seattle. And people say, ‘look at all these people coming from liberal California, that’s going to really transform Montana.’ Well, no, not necessarily. Not if the people coming from California are seeking a place that’s more in line with their preferences,” Saldin said. “And maybe that’s political, right? They’re sick of being in a blue state and want to move to a place that’s more conservative. But it doesn’t even always have to be overtly political. They might say, ‘oh, I want some more wide open country.’”
Saldin emphasized that observations of this kind are common but difficult to prove. “I don’t even know how you would attempt to construct any kind of hard data that empirically proves that point,” he added.
Additionally, as working-class Democratic bastions have shrunk (both in population and in their support for Montana Democrats), more liberal voters in cities like Missoula—home of the University of Montana—wield increasing influence in Democratic primaries, selecting candidates that may not be as appealing statewide.
“You don’t see those people that grew up, you know, working and voting Democrat–––what you traditionally thought of as the Montana Democratic Party. Instead, you see the Subaru set,” said Pepper Petersen, President of the Montana Cannabis Guild, a marijuana industry trade association.
Saldin hit upon similar themes. “For a long time, Democrats were, very clearly, the working class party. And that’s not true anymore,” Saldin said. “To the extent we want to identify one party as being the working class party, that’d be the Republican Party.”
The environmental movement’s increased influence within the Montana Democratic Party has also had complicated electoral consequences. Montana has a strong and broadly popular conservation movement, but when it comes to regulations around fossil fuel extraction and production, environmental protection becomes more polarizing. The Democratic Party’s national messaging on extractive industries has, in the view of some Montana politicians and strategists, contributed to the party’s struggles in the state.
“There has always been that tension in the Montana Democratic Party, between environmentalists and the more union or blue collar resource jobs,” said Bennion, the MSU political scientist. “There is a wing of the Montana Democratic Party that is very progressive, that obviously wants to focus more on renewable energy. That means that those kinds of other jobs that really power our economy in Montana––they don’t necessarily care about those jobs.”
Jason Small, an influential Republican state senator and the Executive Secretary of the Montana AFL-CIO, said his involvement in Republican politics grew out of opposition to President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which threatened jobs in eastern Montana.
Environmental groups, allied with the Democratic Party, “were providing these new rules and regulations to basically eviscerate my entire way of life,” said Small. “It became apparent at that point, even though I was a union member and an officer, I definitely didn’t agree with a whole lot of what was happening.”
Montana Democrats are being squeezed on all sides: by national shifts in working-class and rural voting patterns, an increasingly liberal Democratic primary electorate, and a wave of conservative newcomers to the state.
In addition to these structural challenges, any Democratic candidate would have to run against a wealthy and relatively popular incumbent governor, Republican Greg Gianforte. Like Busse, Gianforte first moved to Montana in the 1990s. After arriving in Bozeman, he founded a technology firm that he eventually sold for $1.5 billion. One of Gianforte’s early hires at the firm was a young executive named Steve Daines, now Montana’s junior senator.
Gianforte’s involvement in public life began as a donor in the mid-2000s. He gave generously to conservative and Christian causes, including to an anti-evolution museum in Glendive, Montana. It was not until 2016, though, that Gianforte first put his name on a ballot. That year, he ran for governor against incumbent Democrat Steve Bullock. Gianforte lost by about four points on the same day Donald Trump carried the state by over 20% and Democrats lost four other statewide elected offices. Throughout the campaign, Gianforte stumbled on crucial Montana issues, like access to public lands, and failed to articulate why Montanans should fire an incumbent with high approval ratings.
Gianforte burst onto the national political stage in a 2017 special election, when he ran to replace the newly-appointed Interior Secretary, Congressman Ryan Zinke. Frustrated with questioning from Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, Gianforte shoved him to the ground. Although he was convicted of misdemeanor assault, Gianforte still narrowly beat his opponent, country singer Rob Quist. “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my kinda guy,” President Trump said at a rally after Gianforte’s narrow victory.
In 2020, Gianforte sought the governor’s office for a second time and won a commanding victory in the general election over incumbent Lt. Governor Mike Cooney. Since taking office, Gianforte has advanced many conservative priorities, including signing legislation banning TikTok and legalizing charter schools. He has also pushed a conservative social agenda, restricting the ability of transgender youth to play on womens’ sports teams and signing several anti-abortion measures, which were quickly rejected by the Montana Supreme Court.
Busse feels Gianforte and the Republican legislature’s aggressive stances on social issues could be an electoral liability for the Republican Party in the hands of the right Democrat. He’s confident that the Montana Republican Party, in catering to a small, socially-conservative subset of its base, has quietly alienated much of the state.
“It’s totally anti-freedom,” Busse said. “I think most Montanans find it detestable.”
Gianforte’s term has not solely been focused on advancing Republican causes. He also received national attention for approving housing and planning reforms aimed at tackling rising home prices in Montana, earning praise in The Atlantic, Bloomberg, and other publications. The reforms, recommended by a commission Gianforte convened to study the housing crisis, focused on easing the permitting process and encouraging dense development in urban areas. Passed with bipartisan support, policymakers across the country have looked to Montana’s reforms as a model for their own states.
While Gianforte’s term has seen notable successes, there have also been serious unforced errors. In 2022, Gianforte hired 28-year-old Charlie Brereton to run the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services––the state’s largest department. Brereton, whose youth has earned him the nickname “the intern,” has overhauled the state’s Medicaid eligibility process. His reforms have led to over 110,000 Montanans, or roughly one in ten, being kicked off Medicaid. Nearly two-thirds of those who lost their coverage did so due to paperwork issues, not actual disputes over their eligibility. Nearly 25,000 of those who lost coverage are children.
The issues that could inflict the most political damage on Gianforte, though, are Montanans’ skyrocketing property tax bills. Montana periodically experiences cycles of rapid residential property-value growth. The state takes a certain percentage of each home’s taxable value to fund education programs. Over the last four years, the average home price in Montana has increased by 60%, which in turn has boosted the amount of money sent to state coffers. In the last year, the median Montanan’s property tax bill increased by 21%.
In the past, the state legislature has countered these tax increases by passing permanent tax relief. This session, though, the legislature only passed a two-time, $600 tax rebate, providing temporary relief instead of a permanent fix.
Gianforte proceeded to blame local governments for Montanans’ increased tax bills, angering both liberal and conservative elected officials across the state.
Chris Hindoien, the Mayor of Choteau, Montana, was one of many conservative local officials who criticized Gianforte’s narrative on the property-tax increase. In a press release, Hindoien said, “Governor Gianforte, along with the Governor’s Housing Task force, and some members of the legislature have tried to blame local government for that tax increase. THAT IS SIMPLY NOT TRUE.”
This issue, and Gianforte’s response to it, has left many Montana political observers confused. “You’re trying to figure out, like, is this electorally helpful? Does this help them negotiate for something? Or did they just eff it up?” Bennion said.
Explanations range from outright incompetence to a masterful plot to put Montana in a fiscal position where it’s necessary for the state to adopt a sales tax during the next legislative session.
Montana currently has income and property taxes, but no sales tax. Before he entered politics, Gianforte advocated for eliminating Montana’s income tax and replacing it with a sales tax. There are arguments for introducing a sales tax in Montana––mainly that it would help the state capture revenue from tourism. But sales taxes are regressive taxes, which property taxes and income taxes are not.
“All of these moves signal that the governor is going to be pushing for a sales tax,” said Pepper Petersen.
“The governor protects his own. He’s within a very small income bracket in Montana,” Petersen continued. “There’s a big disconnect between the average voter in Montana and what Greg Gianforte is and what he represents.”
An adept Democrat might be able to take advantage of widespread anger over the property-tax issue and Gianforte’s broader weaknesses as a politician. The question is whether Busse has what it takes.
Busse thinks that Democrats focus too much on issues and arguments that do not matter to most voters, losing ground to Republicans who know how to sell a broader narrative.
“Republicans are pretty good at setting culture war traps, and I think Democrats are far too good at stepping in them,” Busse said. “When we do that, as Democrats, we send the message that we are so fortunate that we can just sit around worrying about these culture war issues all the time. Meanwhile, in places like Great Falls, they’re like, ‘I need a place to live. I need a job.’ We’re sending this message that we have better things to worry about than that. It’s a political loser.”
Busse believes his path to victory lies in convincing Montana voters that Gianforte is only looking out for himself and his rich friends. It’s a narrative as old as politics itself––classic class politics. But coming from a liberal Democrat in such clear terms, it feels new.
“Everywhere I go, working people feel like their state is being taken from them by wealthy, powerful people,” Busse said.
“You have a governor who is a billionaire, a powerful dude that flies around in a private jet. He embodies this thing that everybody hates. So that’s why I feel like there is this populist movement in the state,” he continued. “I can’t make farmers upset about big agribusiness. I can’t make people in Kalispell scared that they can’t afford their rent. I can’t do that. When the whole populace feels the same kind of angst and a candidate puts flame to it–––that’s when you can beat an incumbent.”
This kind of pugilistic, populist appeal, Busse believes, will allow him to cross partisan barriers that have hindered Democrats in recent cycles. Rising property tax bills, kicking people off Medicaid, catering to wealthy out-of-state hunters––Busse hopes to weave these issues into a story.
“You need to find examples of things that confirm what voters kind of suspected,” he said.
Busse’s approach is not revolutionary: class has long been a Democratic wedge. Obama deployed similar arguments in 2012, asking voters to consider if Mitt Romney would fight for people like them. Steve Bullock also gestured at questions of class and privilege when running against Gianforte in 2016, making pointed asides about access to public lands. But Busse is more explicit about class and wealth than most Democrats have been, and he does not shy away from casting judgment on his opponents’ motives. After telling a story about children losing their Medicaid coverage under Gianforte, he asks, “How f—ing evil is that?”
Busse’s bluntness is part of a broader strategy.
“I think so many times, candidates are like ‘well, geez, we don’t want to say anything bad,’” Busse said. “We don’t want to throw a punch. We don’t want to be tough. Bullshit. The nature of the state hangs in the balance. It’s up to me to tell voters how weird and dangerous it is, and force the choice. Democrats are generally pretty poor at forcing choices. We show up with policy plans instead of telling voters exactly what is at stake.”
Most Montana politicos are skeptical that Busse’s approach will work, though.
“There’s no legitimate challenge against the governor,” Petersen said. “Busse is a ludicrous choice for opposition to Gianforte. Meat going into the grinder, that’s all Ryan Busse represents.”
Saldin was more polite, but no less dubious, about Busse’s chances. “The Busse campaign has an uphill climb,” he said. “Nationalization, the urban-rural divide, working class dynamics. All of those things have only increased in intensity over the last eight years, and they all push towards the Republicans,” referencing the amount of time since Democrats last won a race for governor in Montana.
While the property tax issue has the potential to be politically damaging, some are skeptical it will convince Republican voters to abandon Gianforte on Election Day.
“I don’t know if that property tax discussion is going to be the first thing on people’s minds when they’re voting. Because it’s a presidential election, too. So they’re gonna be choosing between Biden and Trump. They make that calculation first, and then people usually just go right down the party ticket,” Bennion said. “More voters are interested in what party someone has behind their name.”
Others believe the problem with Busse’s campaign lies with the candidate himself––that his criticism of the gun industry could be electoral poison in Montana. His nuanced position on the gun industry will not matter, they contend.
“He rose to prominence within the Democratic Party ranks by acting as an anti-gun representative,” Petersen said. “They’ll talk about him, you know, being a darling of the left’s anti-gun movement,” he continued. “Busse has no chance.”
So, is Busse’s class narrative strong enough to break through partisan loyalties and defeat Gianforte, or will his unorthodox background and a difficult political environment do him in?
Even if he fails, the results of Busse’s efforts may be instructive for Democrats. It’s hard to envision a Democratic statewide victory in Montana without the blue-collar base that has fled the party during the Trump era. If Busse runs well ahead of President Biden or even with Senator Tester, his straight-talking strategy might be worth emulating.